GiftDeck: birthday reminders that arrive in time

The problem was never remembering the date. The calendar does that. The problem is that it tells you on the morning of, when the only thing still available is a card from the petrol station.

So GiftDeck starts from the other end. Every event carries its own lead time, and the default is 17 days — long enough to order something and have it actually arrive. Anywhere from one day to sixty, set per event — a partner's birthday and a colleague's last day are not the same job.

The other half is gift ideas, and you collect them all year. You have them in March, in a shop or halfway down a web page, and by November they are gone. Share something from another app — a link, a scrap of text, a photo — and GiftDeck files it under the person it is for. By the time the reminder arrives, the shortlist is already there, with the links, the photos and roughly what it costs.

Each person is a card: their dates, the running list, a notes field for what you would otherwise lose — sizes, allergies, the thing they already own — and a record of what you gave them, so nobody gets the same book twice. When a relative asks what to get your kid, you send the list on as text, links still tappable. Where the ideas have photos, you can send those as cards instead, description printed onto the picture — because some messengers keep the image and quietly drop the words.

A few things came out of using the app rather than planning it. Birthdays you don't know yet: add the person without a date, and the app asks once a month, one person at a time, until you find out. Contact lists imported from a phone are a mess — half the entries called “Geburtstag von Anna”, the same person in there three times — so there are two tools for it. One rewrites the names, every suggestion editable before you accept it; the other finds duplicates and lets you pick which entry survives. Neither touches anything until you say so. And when someone dies, their entry stays where it is. The reminders simply stop.

There is no account and there is no server of ours. Your list syncs between your own devices through your iCloud account, and we cannot read any of it. Nothing you type is collected or analysed, sharing is always something you start, and a backup is a plain file you make and keep yourself.

It is a small app. It only has to do one thing, on time.